


from the mouths of babes

by dannyboyy



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-10
Updated: 2017-11-10
Packaged: 2019-01-31 15:03:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,984
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12684276
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dannyboyy/pseuds/dannyboyy
Summary: She would have put him out of his misery before he even knew it, had she not seen his potential first. (AU in which Hela was still around for Loki and Thor's early lives.)or: loki and hela in five steps.





	from the mouths of babes

**Author's Note:**

> ragnorak dragged me back into my loki stan phase, god help me. this fic is dedicated to veliseraptor if she ever reads it bc i love her and her writing. enjoy!

i.

If Jotunheim wasn’t a wasteland before, it certainly is now that she’s done with it. If it were up to her, she’d have razed the whole planet to the ground for daring to defy the might of the All-Father and his eldest child. Plumes of flames fan out from her feet with every step, burning her path into the very earth as she makes her way to the temple, where her father has defeated Laufey. 

She tries not to feel satisfied when she sees he has lost an eye for his weakness, his willingness to stoop to their level in the first place.

She finds herself trying less hard when it comes to her father, lately.

Odin turns towards her fully and she sees in his arms a baby, blue like cold lips and with ugly red eyes so like blood and yet unlike it, too. The little ridges on its skin denoting its ancestry are raised and look like a mutilation even as she knows the markings are natural. It is a hideous little creature; its only saving grace is that it does not yet know what it is.

She scoffs and rolls her eyes, summoning a pitifully small dagger into the palm of her hand and gesturing impatiently to her father, come, give it here, I haven’t got all day.

Odin looks to her with that peculiar look he seems to don so much recently, like he’s about to speak and then thinks better of it.

“No, Hela,” he says instead.

How she tires of being told no. 

He strokes his thumb over the hurtful little ridges on the baby’s forehead, and like paint being spilled, the blue is chased away by his fingertips, leaving being cold, pink Aesir skin. The little marks recede back into the child’s skin and he squirms in discomfort at the sudden cold.

Hela sneers and raises the tiny dagger, intending for a moment to kill him anyways, Odin be damned. 

The child cries loudly and opens his little eyes, and for a moment they are not blue like Odin’s or Thor’s or her own, but vivid, poisonous green, like the lines on her armor. She stays her hand. They fade slowly into an icy, crystalline blue, but she knows what she has seen. 

Perhaps she’ll go along with the old fool this once, for all that she suspects he’s getting on in his years. 

This child is different. 

ii.  
The little cuckoo child is so much like Thor, and so much not. He is curious, and loud, and seeks to run scarcely before his legs have landed beneath him. But he is also something else entirely, something hidden behind his fake blue eyes. Sometimes she looks into his eyes and sees not the eyes of a child but the eyes of intense focus; the eyes of one who seeks to rise above their meager station.

Hela has grown rather attached to her Loki, her little monster. 

One day, when he is scarcely beyond toddling, he turns those keen eyes upon Thor’s dinner, and it transmutes into a writhing mass of half-formed snake like apparitions. He is a mage, and seemingly a prodigious one at that. 

Hela grins into her goblet, scarcely able to contain her glee. 

Her little monster will be strong indeed. 

iii.  
Hela has taken to fantasizing, of late. Herself, on the throne. Odin, perhaps dead, perhaps subservient. She has yet to decide, and relishes that it could be a matter of her whim, the ultimate fate of the All-Father, Odin, the King of the Nine Realms. Lately, Loki has starred in her little fictions as well; a monster at her side, a mockery of the “benevolence” Odin so lauds, and her beautiful little executioner. 

By now, Loki has begun to notice that he is different, but just how different is still beyond his wildest imaginations. She smiles at him sometimes, and she thinks he might see the secrets in between her teeth, the insecurity that comes with not being sure whether or not a joke is being made at your expense. His mastery of seidr is impressive, and he grows stronger and more cunning by the day, but he still favors illusion magic, as it is what he practices most, with his pitifully juvenile pranks and games he plays with Thor. She would have her executioner be a strong conjurer, like herself, able to adapt to the needs of any battle, to never be unarmed. 

She seeks to teach him. 

“See, little Loki, it is simple. Form in your mind’s eye the image of the weapon you crave. What will feel good in your hands, and lay waste to your enemies. Do you see it?” 

Loki fidgets in place, eyes closed. His nod, at least, is certain, if his body is less so. Hela smiles indulgently.

“Good. Now concentrate your seidr into your hand, and imagine it being made real. The weight falling into your palm. The grip of the weapon feeling your skin.” 

Loki breathes out slowly and gestures as he has often seen her do, and shrieks and jumps back in fear as a jagged, ugly piece of metal emerges from the air and cuts his arm as it falls lifelessly to the floor. He cradles his injured arm close to his chest, sniffling in the aftermath of his fear, and glances up at her, expecting disapproval. She smiles instead.

“That’s alright, little changeling. You will master it one day, I am sure of it. You are more powerful than you could ever know.” But never so powerful as me. 

She considers him for a moment, and smiles at him once more. 

“Come, Loki. Until the time comes when you can conjure powerful weapons yourself, I will give you a weapon of your very own, to cherish and learn with. Consider it a reward for being so brave in the face of injury.” 

He smiles shyly at the praise, and his chest puffs out with pride, wound already all but forgotten. Her smile takes on a sinister edge that he could not hope to see with his child’s eyes. 

She summons to her hand the very dagger that had she had once intended for his weak little heart, back on the frozen wasteland of his birth. He takes it eagerly, excitedly, immediately falling into familiar practice stances with it, thrusting it against imaginary enemies. She blinks and he is wrapped around her waist, hugging her.

“Thank you,” he whispers against her armor. 

She puts a hand on top of his head, his head of dark hair much like her own, and smiles proudly at what she’s begun to create. 

He uses the dagger to cut Sif’s beautiful blonde hair and turn it carrion black, like his, like hers. 

iv.  
Loki has grown into his skin, as much wearing a false skin can do so. His mastery of magecraft has no true equal in the entire realm, for how unique his skills and power are. He still prefers illusions, but they are complex now; walking and talking and many at once sometimes. He accompanies his brother Thor to faraway realms under Asgard’s rule and they wreak merry havoc and have perilous adventures together. His armor is green, like hers, but more earthen than venomous. He brings her back souvenirs, flushed with excitement, and sometimes he vents to her of Thor’s recklessness, but it is often without heat, for he could never hold too much against his sunlit brother. 

Her little monster has begun to forget his place, she thinks. She smiles at him still, but she begins to make plans. A wise king to be, she is prepared for a war with her pretty cuckoo. She tells herself she is only humoring an old fool by not seeking it out directly yet. 

Odin’s middle child is an oaf, decent in battle and worth little else, and yet the child she so lovingly spared looks at him as though he planted Yggdrasil himself.

To Loki, Hela is like gravity; an unquestionable force of great power, which has always been there. To Loki, Thor is like the sun: bright, if sometimes hard to look at directly, and warm. Even if Loki’s feet are on the ground, his face still tilts toward the sky.

Hela is a jealous god. 

She steals the Casket of Ancient Winters one day, the pitifully weak heart of his bastard homeworld, and chases him down on the Bifrost, seconds from departing with Thor and his band of merry idiots on some inane quest. Heimdall, who it seems has never trusted her completely, turns in alarm, and she freezes in him solid. Loki starts, and she sees it. In a moment of indecision, he steps closer to Thor. Further from her. 

She growls and advances towards him, grabbing his wrists in a vice and pulling his hands to join her own on the Casket. He starts at the bitter chill, the hum of stirring magic within it, and slowly, just as it had all those years ago, his skin begins to change color. He looks at her in a panic, fake blue eyes blown wide and breath coming out in sharp gasps. Around her, like the roll of thunder in the distance, she can hear Thor demanding to know what’s going on, see his friends shifting with uncertainty, but she and Loki have eyes only for each other. Just as it was always meant to be.

She leans in close, until her lips are by his ear.

“You were less than nothing without me, and you always will be,”

She breaks away from him, leaving him to fall to his knees gasping and staring at his fading blue hands like he doesn’t know what he’s seeing. She grins and it feels feral on her face. 

She climbs up the pedestal, aims the Bifrost at Jotunheim, and unleashes hell upon it.

v.  
When it comes down it, Thor chooses Loki over her easily, and she cannot say she is surprised, or even upset. He waves Mjolnir at her as though she should feel frightened, and she feels only giddy. They fight, and she splits her attention between toying with her brother and her cuckoo, defending against one and attacking the other. 

Thor’s friends have joined the fray as well, because Thor has that effect on people, that they would be so bold as to attack the All Father’s first born to support him. She taunts Loki but he has not yet risen from the heap she left him in. 

They force her back, out of observatory, more because she lets them than anything else. She laughs, sending blades launching left and right, and suddenly the loud roar of the Bifrost powers down, and she whirls, snarl on her lips. 

Loki stands in the opening to the observatory, Casket in one hand and Bifrost sword in the other. He looks at her as though he would cry, had she trained him to be so weak. Thor and his friends have ceased attacking her, waiting with bated breath for the outcome between the two of them. 

Loki approaches her, slowly, dragging his feet, like a man set for the gallows. When he stands before her, a few inches taller than her (when had that happened?), he breathes in to speak--

\--and Odin emerges at last on her other side, pinning her between the monster she made and the one that made her. 

He regards her with his one eye, and shakes his head, confused and hurt. 

“No, Hela,” he says. 

She considers her options. 

She grabs Loki by the shoulders and tips them both over, over the edge of the Bifrost and into the cold water below. It carries them both, swifter and stronger than she had ever dreamed, over the edge. 

They fall into the Void together, a monster and its victim.


End file.
